The tool, publicly released Monday, uses a statistical risk assessment and an “expert opinion pool” to gauge the likelihood of a new episode of mass killing before a certain date.

Chicago-based Cultivate Labs powers the expert opinion pool, which represents some of the company’s work in internal crowdsourcing.

Myanmar, Nigeria and Sudan are among the 10 countries most likely to experience an episode of mass killing before Jan. 1, according to project organizers. The project defines mass killings as those that involve 4,000 or more civilian casualties perpetrated by a government or its proxies within a calendar year.

The statistical risk assessment averages three models, each of which was developed from historical data to identify patterns leading to state-led mass killings. One model, for example, looks at factors such as international isolation and authoritarian rule.

But while those assessments draw from annual data, events such as military coups, assassination plots or elections mean a country’s likelihood of mass violence can change drastically over time.

“Things change over the course of a year in a country,” Hudson said. “The expert opinion (portion of the tool) is very dynamic; it changes day to day and month to month, and is really responsive to events on the ground. We wanted something people would engage with over the course of the year and really create a conversation about why these countries are at risk and what more needs to be done to prevent the next Syria or the next Sudan.”

The expert opinion pool uses a platform from Cultivate Labs, which helps organizations use internal crowdsourcing to make decisions. The company has worked with organizations to predict figures such as sales forecasts, CEO Adam Siegel said.

“In a large organization, you don’t want to say certain things because you think you’re going to get in trouble,” Siegel said. “That’s like an epidemic in these companies. We’ve created an anonymous crowdsourcing process to better capture information and better predict what’s going to happen.”

Cultivate Labs, whose clients include Caterpillar, Shell and AbbVie, continues to expand in this area, launching this week a new sort of internal Kickstarter for clients. A participating company distributes funds to participating employees, giving them the ability to float new ideas and receive support in the form of financial backing.

“It’s almost like we’re applying a VC model to internal innovation,” Siegel said. “This is the seed funding round, and from there, they can decide to fund things at a greater level.”

Some companies do idea drives or retreats to spark new initiatives, Siegel said, but results from those events aren’t truly innovative.

“What we’ve found is that a lot of that doesn’t work very well, and ends up being still according to what an executive wants or some agenda that already exists,” he said. “Crowdsourcing makes it a much more credible process.”

The Early Warning Project uses Cultivate Labs’ technology to collect opinions from regional and subject-matter experts who regularly weigh in on areas that the tool examines.

Hudson said he hopes the tool can alert governments and advocacy groups before violence occurs.

“If we know that a key indicator is a percentage of GDP spent on military or income equality, or a combination of those two together, those are indicators we can look at ... in real-time and say, ‘This is a dangerous and potent combination of factors, and we need to pay attention here,’” Hudson said.

“If we can do that, and direct resources in a very targeted and very efficient way before violence happens, we feel like we can have a real impact in this overall goal of genocide prevention.”